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The opening line of a blog post really matters.

In that tiny space, you have to convince the reader that your post is worth reading.

A common travel writing and blogging error: Driving to the airport

How many times have you read or written something like this? (I confess, I’ve done it.)

It was a calm and sunny day as we loaded up the old SUV with battered luggage and headed to YVR for our long-awaited trip to Rome. We’d been saving for this for years, and now the sacrifices were going to pay off.

No one minded that we had to wait an extra half hour for takeoff, but it was such a relief when the Fasten Seat Belt light went out.

Arrrrrrgggghhhhhhhhhh!

Take the reader somewhere good

Those two paragraphs are technically fine. They tell us something, and the English is quite acceptable. But nothing happened.

Unless the guy beside you turned out to be Justin Bieber and you were able to bore him by talking about your ballpoint pen collection for the entire flight to Rome, leave this part out. The whole packing, getting to the airport, flying, landing, riding the taxi or bus or train to the city and finally stumbling into bed tired but happy and ready to explore a new place should remain in your private diary.

It’s like clearing your throat before you give a speech. Just get on with it already.

Three ways to fix a boring opening

If you have more ways to add, just put them in the comments below and the next time I write about this, I will give you credit in bright shiny bold font.

Write the story the way you started out, the boring way. After a while you will bore yourself and you’ll want to change directions. It will become obvious that what you really want everyone to know about isn’t the plane ride. It’s the fireworks in Barcelona, or the rain on your hair on the Champs-Élysées, or the time you ZORBed at Rotorua. Stop what you were doing and jump to the good part.

Set a timer for half an hour. Use one of those noisy kitchen timers and make sure you can see how much time is left as it goes tick-tick-tick. You’ll have a sense of urgency that feels a bit like writing an exam, only much more fun. (I am partly stealing this idea from the Pomodoro Technique).

Pretend you’re writing this for the coolest person you know. Pretend the coolest person you know is reading it aloud to an audience of cool people. Up your game!

Bonus:

4. Write your whole story in two sentences, maximum 100 words. Then expand as needed, but only if it makes the core story more compelling. You are not writing a police report. You don’t have to account for every hour of the day.

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Don’t talk about the drive to the zoo. Open with trying to find the Red Panda.

Examples of some good openings

These examples are good openings of a calibre that you can achieve. I am not going to throw Hemingway and Shakespeare in here. I’m not Hemingway and neither are you. Let’s set our sights on realistic techniques we can all use.

I picked these three examples sort of randomly. I have a lot of travel writer and blogger friends on Facebook and these three particular writers appeared in my feed recently. I grabbed a recent sample from each writer without evaluating the example first. I know I can trust these writers to publish quality material every time. In fairness to the writers, I wasn’t trying to find opening lines that started with literal hair on fire. I wanted professional opening lines that we can learn from.

From Lola Akinmade Akerstrom, prolific writer and photographer, this is the first sentence of “Kwang Yaw, Cambodia“, an excerpt from Lola’s book Due North. The excerpt is reproduced on her website LolaAkinmade.com and says:

“A sharp turn off the paved main road and our volunteer team finds itself plowing through muddy, unpaved tracks dozens of miles from Phnom Penh, Cambodia.”

Lola starts at the scene of the action. We know who the players are (the volunteer team), where they are (dozens of miles from Phnom Penh), and we get a sense of going into the unknown (“off the paved main road”). This opening line is intended to catch our interest and make us ask, “Who are these people and what will happen to them here?”. That will keep readers hooked.

The opening sentence here also opens a window onto Cambodia. If we arrived at this article because we were searching for something about Cambodia, we’re going to hang around and read more.

“If you’re a golfer who likes a drink – and is there any other kind? – then pack your bags and your clubs and head for Phoenix in the winter.”

Mike’s audience is interested in drinks. Mike knows spirits. Readers come to him because he’s a reliable source. Just as Lola did, Mike has established who’s involved (golfers), and where they are (Phoenix in winter). He has given the readers a reason to continue by implying that by reading this article, the Phoenix golfer will have a better than average drinking experience.

“Perhaps you’ve wanted for a long time to see Provence, and have heard that the best way to do it is to go on a bicycle tour.”

The people most likely to be reading this article have been searching for information about bicycle tours in Provence, probably with or without electric assist bikes. The first sentence makes it clear that there’s something coming about cycling in Provence, and the title adds the electric assist.

One great thing about this sentence is that you can feel the “But” coming. It’s because the sentence starts with “Perhaps”. We’ve been triggered to expect something to fix the sense of indecision that “Perhaps” invokes.

“Perhaps” or “maybe” is a signal that there could be a debate of some sort coming up. In this article, Grace presents the pros and cons of the electric bike, but not just on a boring shop floor. She lands us right in France on a cycling tour.

What about the hair on fire?

When I wrote the title to this post, “Start with your hair on fire: Your opening line matters”, I was thinking of two things. One was my friend Steven who used to say “hair on fire” when we were in school, meaning there was too much to do and not enough time to get it done. That’s the feeling I was going for in tip number 2 when I said to use a noisy, visible timer. It seemed better than asking you to actually set your hair on fire.

The other thing I was thinking of was David Sedaris’s wonderful book title, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, which is automatically intriguing.

Bottom line: Try to be automatically intriguing. If your experience of packing, driving to the airport, sitting on the plane, etc. doesn’t involve your hair on fire or being engulfed in flames (and I sincerely hope it never does), don’t start there.

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I started this blog, Be A Great Place, to encourage you to have a blog. Fill it with stories about places, especially where you live and where you’ve travelled.

Great stories make great places.

For example, let’s think about the great mountains of the world. Something about mountains makes people want to interact with them.

Because most of us have never seen any of the most famous mountains, the bare facts – how high, how cold, how much snow fall there, and so on – these facts don’t mean too much to us on their own. Instead, we remember stories of the people who live there, the ones who’ve died on the way up or down, the ones who made it – all of these stories are part of the magic.

Great stories make great places. Be a local and travel blogger. BeAGreatPlace.com

A less obvious example is the place where you are right now. Is it nothing special or the best place on earth?

Is the church where you or your daughter got married meaningful? How about where your parents used to live, or the spot where that tree fell down in the big storm, or the old school, the new factory – every place has stories.

Not every story has to be romantic or dramatic. It’s fine to blog about pure facts. If a local restaurant serves delicious homemade pie, other people will want to know it. They also need to know where the diner is and when it’s serving pie. Your actual story can be one line: This place has the best cherry pie I’ve ever tasted. You add the facts to complete the blog post.

I love coaching people to blog about places. Blogs are still a fairly new and accessible way to tell stories. You can write, or use photos, videos, voice recordings, music, drawings, whatever you want. Blogging is very flexible that way.

It’s fun to blog.

Here’s my rant. I’m tired of every main street having the same shops and everyone buying the same merchandise from the same stores. I am tired of seeing tourists ignore the out-of-the-way not-so-famous places. We are getting so used to one story, one fashion, one look, one route – well, we need more stories to change that.

There are stories everywhere. Your stories are as important and meaningful as anyone else’s.

This is my shameless pitch: Let’s get going on your blog. I hope you feel that places are important, because that’s my starting point.

Finally, there are sign-up forms all over the page to encourage you. Please take the plunge and do some blogging, or blog more about your own places if you already have a blog. You have nothing to lose.